What Is vSAN - Virtual Storage Area Network? | vSAN

Hola! Yo soy Elver Sena Sosa and this is "What is vSAN?" But before we answer that question we probably should be answering the question why vSAN? Why go to the trouble of creating a new protocol storage protocol when you already have probably channel, block-level iSCSI and NFS, right? And they work well they are really good at what they do so why bother with a new one? And the reason is rather simple especially doing operations. You see when you have a virtual machine running on ESXi host, the virtual machine is in a data store which is bad by either a LUN or in an NFS data store. In either way whatever storage services this VM is consuming from your storage solution those service has to be predefined on the storage channel. For example, you want to have rate protection well then that LUN has to be configured for let's say RAID 5 but and that's ok that works great but the challenge becomes what if you have another VM with its VMDK and that VM, it's a database per se is running a database it requires RAID 6 protection. In that case you cannot really drop this new VM onto that existing data store because has been backed by RAID 5 so your alternative is to create another data store create another one and you put that VM in a new data store, but then your data store has to be backed by a different storage LUN. Or again NFS which would then on the back can be protected by that RAID 6 solution. So you see there is the the unit of service or the configuration for the services is not done on a per VM level is done at the LUN level and if you restore it as administrator and you'll be dealing with this this requires you to pre-configure all this in advance and you don't always know what all you're going to be needing to consume when it comes to storage like how much how big they make the LUN upfront. So this is one of the biggest challenges for it. Now that seems like one problem but, a second problem that occurs because of this is that because you have to pre configure everything. If the business has a need to provide a new application short notice, they need it yesterday, instead of the case today, most businesses need things yesterday. You usually have to wait for the array or whatever your storage solution is to be prepared to provide you that storage service that you need which is going to take time. So vSAN was put together or created so that you migrate the need of having the services configured on the storage side of house and you put it on the VM storage side of the house with something that VMware calls SPBM, which stands for storage policy based management. By having the ability of setting policy or services for storage directly on the VM, it allows you to speed up the consumption of the storage services by the VM. So now when the business comes back and says hey we need this we had this business need and the developer says we need to deploy this application waiting for the storage administrator to provide you those storage services is no longer required. All you need to do is tell vSphere for this VM, I need the equivalent of RAID 5 or RAID 6 protection and voila vSphere does this automatically for you! So what is vSAN? vSAN is an object-based in kernal storage solution that allows you to provide a storage on a per VM basis. So vSAN runs in kernel in each of the ESXi hosts in that cluster. And all of those hosts will have a single data store your vSAN data store that can provide you or all of your storage services on my per VM level so if you have a VM on this host with its VMDK and that VM requires requires RAID 5 protection or equivalent to it that VM can be stored in the datastore, vSAN datastore. You can have a second VM in any host in the cluster and this one requires RAID 0. Maybe it's not that important to you you have 20 of those so then loosing one it doesn't matter to your application. That VM can also reside on the same vSAN datastore. And there is no longer the need to be pre-configuring your storage with the different storage services so that you can make this happen. Something about about what is vSAN as well besides that is object storage which we covered in another video is that vSAN is distributed so from the ESXi host perspective they send stuff to the vSAN datastore and then the vSAN algorithm would be smart enough that will determine where and which other hosts in that cluster the data for that VM will be stored. As long as your SPBM for that VM does not get violated. Now for the distributed component you will need a network, so each of your hosts that are part of your vSAN cluster need to connect to a network and they need to have layer 3 connectivity between each other. No need for multicast just regular IP unicast. vSAN supports one gig or 10 gigs or 40 gigs or however fast you want to make it. vSAN works with all of those. Now which of those you will use there is a slightly dependency on the type of storage that you use which is in a disk group there is a hybrid and an all flash and we'll be discussing that in a future video. Thank you for watching and I am Elver Sena Sosa.

Channel: VMware vSAN

Views: 132,486

Rating: 4.9272728 out of 5

Keywords: vsan, virtual san, vmware vsan, vmware, hci, hyperconverged, hyper-converged, hyper-convergence, hyperconverged infrastructure, vSAN tutorial, storage area network, network storage system, network area storage, san storage area network, storage area network fundamentals, virtual storage area network, virtual storage area, storage area network basics, storage area network solutions, storage area network hardware

Id: D5pDF8nhqgs

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2017